NEW YORK (AP) – A West African man in prison for drug smuggling is suing doctors who surgically removed heroin-filled balloons from his stomach and intestines.
William Meequaye Kanyi, 40, of Ghana, contends the surgery amounted to an illegal search and seizure. His federal lawsuit is seeking $5 million in damages.
Kanyi, serving time at a federal prison in Pennsylvania, contends U.S. Customs Service agents at Kennedy Airport and doctors at Mary Immaculate Hospital forced him to undergo unnecessary surgery, ignoring his pleas to let the balloons pass through his system.
“It’s an excessive invasion of a person,” Kanyi’s lawyer, Velly Polycarpe, said Friday. “You don’t go inside someone and search their internal organs.”
U.S. Customs and the hospital declined comment Friday.
Officials previously have said Kanyi, upon arriving at Kennedy Airport, consented to an X-ray search that revealed he had swallowed the balloons and that customs “had no control over the actions of the medical personnel at the hospital.”
